Hazel Osmond's Blog
August 16, 2013
Things you’ll discover when you get published
I have somehow managed to delete my blog posts ... yes, I am a technical genius ... so am starting from scratch. Here goes ...
On the eve of ’Playing Grace’ getting published, and in the spirit of passing things forward, I offer you a quick tour of the highlights (and some of the low spots) of the things I’ve learned about having a book ‘out there’. Well, three books out there.
1. You will become your own mad stalker. You start to watch the sales figures, hunt out review sites, google your book title, sift through feedback. You cannot enter a book shop without re-arranging your book so that it is somehow more prominent. This may involve shifting other writer’s work to one side. If Sharon Osbourne ever finds out she will kill me. Or send me something unspeakable in a box.
2. You will discover that you have a thinner and a thicker skin than you thought. How can that be? Well, you may receive a whole wedge of marvellous reviews on Amazon but it is the negative ones that you’ll remember… but within those negative ones, you will, after a little smarting, take the considered opinions on the chin. After all, it’s part of the deal of being a writer and if you thought you were going to make everybody skippingly happy you are mad.
You may even learn from criticism … until it comes to the nasty, throwaway, troll-like comments. Then your skin appears to be airmail paper and your initial reaction is to hurtle foaming-mouthed to the wine bottle. Your second reaction is to write something scathing back. You fight that impulse. Your third reaction is the correct one … you turn your back on it and remember that people are entitled to their opinions, particularly if they’ve paid out money. This doesn’t mean that three years down the line you won’t be able to remember that person’s name. Or which part of the country their cave is in.
3. The amount of support and encouragement you receive can at times make you weepy. You will also find some people really surprise you … I have had bods who I previously thought did not care for me very much, bounce up and say, with genuine enthusiasm, that they loved a book and would I sign it for them please. The down side? People I know who have never, ever mentioned any books I have written. Have they just decided they are so dreadful they can’t bear to talk about them?
In your sane moments you tell yourself the world does not revolve around you and just carry on as normal. In your insane moments you determine never to show any interest in the things that are important to them either. You invariably forget and ask them how their kids are doing … but that grudge is building …
4. You will discover that you have an ego the size of China which is kept in check by a voice in your head telling you not to show off. This means that while you might ring the local radio station to arrange an interview, you lie awake the night before thinking ’that’s a bit too swanky isn’t it?’ You will readily agree to give all kinds of talks, but ensure everything you say has that, ‘Aw shucks, I don’t know how all this has happened to me’ undertone. Your greatest fear is that someone will stand up at the end and say that the fact you got a book published was a fluke. No, that’s not true - your greatest fear is that you’ll agree with them.
5. You shelve that part of you which says the first thing that comes into your mind, especially when you’re anywhere as ‘Hazel Osmond, writer.’ So when someone collars you and says they could write a book and get it published too if they had the time, you nod and agree even though you are certain that there are many things other than time that are preventing them from getting that Pulitzer prize winner out there. Conversely, you are happy to offer advice and help to anyone who genuinely wants to write. Whether they want your advice and help is a moot point, but you’re going to offer it anyway.
6. Before you are published you say with conviction that you are not going to be ashamed of the sex scenes in your book, and of course your children will understand. Once you are published, you are much less sure. Particularly when your children’s friends buy your books. You refuse to even think about the Freudian overtones of your daughter’s boyfriend reading them.
7. You will be tempted to buy some of your own books yourself to bump up the sales figures. You don’t. But you’re still tempted. Once you sat in Bristol Airport and read your own book, laughing out loud at frequent intervals and looking reflective as you closed it. This is a form of madness and it does not make it any better that you understand this.
8. You will have to put up with people taking pot shots at the genre in which you write. At first you will smile sweetly and not rise to the bait. You will even keep silent when someone who used to be on your university course says, ‘Yeah, you can make a good living by trashing that kind of book out,’ even though your brain is thinking, ‘I do not trash anything out, I sit and work and work at it.’
As time goes on, you find yourself more and more irritated that people look down their nose at what you write and that this also means they are being sniffy about the swathes of people who read and enjoy romantic fiction. You know that it’s only a matter of time before you scream at someone trying to play the intellectually superior card, ‘Who says you can’t enjoy Hilary Mantel one week and some Harriet Evans the next? Who put you in charge of the nation’s reading list?’ This incident will possibly take place in a bookshop.
9. You will come to understand the amount of work that being a writer and publicising your work involves. This will be brought home to you somewhere after the publication of your first book, when the memory of your well-attended book launch has faded; all the people who know you have already bought your little darling, and you are standing in a bookshop where they have kindly invited you to do a book signing and nobody knows you from Adam.
You will watch other books flying off the shelves and it will dawn on you that while you have the great good fortune to have a brilliant agent and publisher and to be distributed in the shops, you are a new author and you might as well be wearing an invisibility cloak. You will spend a long time being politely rebuffed by people who you approach. You will make a tit of yourself by asking two men in the thriller section whether they like romances. You will listen to someone tell you about the book they have written and then, at some point, a person will take the book from your hand, listen to what you have to say about it and pull a face. But later, possibly much later, someone will pick the book up, ask you to sign it and then go to the counter and actually hand over cash. That sale will be one of the sweetest things that has ever happened to you and you will understand that all your ideas about being an author up to that point were insubstantial daydreams and this is better.
10. Some people will care enough about your books to write to you and you will realise that whatever else happens in your writing career, that moment of connection is what you’ve been looking for. It is what makes writing the best job ever in the entire world.
On the eve of ’Playing Grace’ getting published, and in the spirit of passing things forward, I offer you a quick tour of the highlights (and some of the low spots) of the things I’ve learned about having a book ‘out there’. Well, three books out there.
1. You will become your own mad stalker. You start to watch the sales figures, hunt out review sites, google your book title, sift through feedback. You cannot enter a book shop without re-arranging your book so that it is somehow more prominent. This may involve shifting other writer’s work to one side. If Sharon Osbourne ever finds out she will kill me. Or send me something unspeakable in a box.
2. You will discover that you have a thinner and a thicker skin than you thought. How can that be? Well, you may receive a whole wedge of marvellous reviews on Amazon but it is the negative ones that you’ll remember… but within those negative ones, you will, after a little smarting, take the considered opinions on the chin. After all, it’s part of the deal of being a writer and if you thought you were going to make everybody skippingly happy you are mad.
You may even learn from criticism … until it comes to the nasty, throwaway, troll-like comments. Then your skin appears to be airmail paper and your initial reaction is to hurtle foaming-mouthed to the wine bottle. Your second reaction is to write something scathing back. You fight that impulse. Your third reaction is the correct one … you turn your back on it and remember that people are entitled to their opinions, particularly if they’ve paid out money. This doesn’t mean that three years down the line you won’t be able to remember that person’s name. Or which part of the country their cave is in.
3. The amount of support and encouragement you receive can at times make you weepy. You will also find some people really surprise you … I have had bods who I previously thought did not care for me very much, bounce up and say, with genuine enthusiasm, that they loved a book and would I sign it for them please. The down side? People I know who have never, ever mentioned any books I have written. Have they just decided they are so dreadful they can’t bear to talk about them?
In your sane moments you tell yourself the world does not revolve around you and just carry on as normal. In your insane moments you determine never to show any interest in the things that are important to them either. You invariably forget and ask them how their kids are doing … but that grudge is building …
4. You will discover that you have an ego the size of China which is kept in check by a voice in your head telling you not to show off. This means that while you might ring the local radio station to arrange an interview, you lie awake the night before thinking ’that’s a bit too swanky isn’t it?’ You will readily agree to give all kinds of talks, but ensure everything you say has that, ‘Aw shucks, I don’t know how all this has happened to me’ undertone. Your greatest fear is that someone will stand up at the end and say that the fact you got a book published was a fluke. No, that’s not true - your greatest fear is that you’ll agree with them.
5. You shelve that part of you which says the first thing that comes into your mind, especially when you’re anywhere as ‘Hazel Osmond, writer.’ So when someone collars you and says they could write a book and get it published too if they had the time, you nod and agree even though you are certain that there are many things other than time that are preventing them from getting that Pulitzer prize winner out there. Conversely, you are happy to offer advice and help to anyone who genuinely wants to write. Whether they want your advice and help is a moot point, but you’re going to offer it anyway.
6. Before you are published you say with conviction that you are not going to be ashamed of the sex scenes in your book, and of course your children will understand. Once you are published, you are much less sure. Particularly when your children’s friends buy your books. You refuse to even think about the Freudian overtones of your daughter’s boyfriend reading them.
7. You will be tempted to buy some of your own books yourself to bump up the sales figures. You don’t. But you’re still tempted. Once you sat in Bristol Airport and read your own book, laughing out loud at frequent intervals and looking reflective as you closed it. This is a form of madness and it does not make it any better that you understand this.
8. You will have to put up with people taking pot shots at the genre in which you write. At first you will smile sweetly and not rise to the bait. You will even keep silent when someone who used to be on your university course says, ‘Yeah, you can make a good living by trashing that kind of book out,’ even though your brain is thinking, ‘I do not trash anything out, I sit and work and work at it.’
As time goes on, you find yourself more and more irritated that people look down their nose at what you write and that this also means they are being sniffy about the swathes of people who read and enjoy romantic fiction. You know that it’s only a matter of time before you scream at someone trying to play the intellectually superior card, ‘Who says you can’t enjoy Hilary Mantel one week and some Harriet Evans the next? Who put you in charge of the nation’s reading list?’ This incident will possibly take place in a bookshop.
9. You will come to understand the amount of work that being a writer and publicising your work involves. This will be brought home to you somewhere after the publication of your first book, when the memory of your well-attended book launch has faded; all the people who know you have already bought your little darling, and you are standing in a bookshop where they have kindly invited you to do a book signing and nobody knows you from Adam.
You will watch other books flying off the shelves and it will dawn on you that while you have the great good fortune to have a brilliant agent and publisher and to be distributed in the shops, you are a new author and you might as well be wearing an invisibility cloak. You will spend a long time being politely rebuffed by people who you approach. You will make a tit of yourself by asking two men in the thriller section whether they like romances. You will listen to someone tell you about the book they have written and then, at some point, a person will take the book from your hand, listen to what you have to say about it and pull a face. But later, possibly much later, someone will pick the book up, ask you to sign it and then go to the counter and actually hand over cash. That sale will be one of the sweetest things that has ever happened to you and you will understand that all your ideas about being an author up to that point were insubstantial daydreams and this is better.
10. Some people will care enough about your books to write to you and you will realise that whatever else happens in your writing career, that moment of connection is what you’ve been looking for. It is what makes writing the best job ever in the entire world.
